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[WIP]Short Movie

As we mention it in our previous article, we are working on an animated short movie with the mysterious code name “Spider”. This short is the occasion for us to work together on a large-scale project as a showcase for our collective.

Origin of the project

The idea of making a short movie has run through our mind during many month without a satisfying story. The difficulty was both on the storyline and technical constraints. Indeed, we knew that none of us would have much time to give to the realization and we shouldn’t be stuck in a too ambitious project. So Chloé has found us a little story about a sweet baby spider who came to be separated from her mommy. With bravery, she manage to recover her and heal her. This short is a simple and funny sketch in which gags come one after another.

For the technical part, the only one set simplify the amount of work in terms of modeling, lighting and little of visual effect. The only major difficulty is the animation of our characters: an eight-legged spider isn’t the easiest thing for an animator! Julien, our head of animation, has given us the go ahead in a really short notice which had launch the preproduction!

In the upcoming articles, we will depict the different states of our preproduction and the in progress production.

The Encounter

In the early fall, the production has made enough progress so that we have decided to test our pipeline before starting the real thing. With the final spider model and her rig, named as ‘Baby’, Julien has animated a short scene of fifteen seconds in which Baby have a strange encounter with a ball on the set of our short movie: an old and dusty wood workshop.

With the animated scene, Kevin and Henri have then made the set and the lighting. For the rendering, they have sent the project to our friends at Sheep-it, a collaborative render farm. After numerous back-and-forth due to some render errors and many retakes, we managed to finish on time for the Suzanne Awards contest, a little animation festival which take place every year at the Blender Conference in Amsterdam.